Ep. 24: Personal Health Data – Austin Jones (CEO UnityHealthScore)
Austin Jones from Niceville, FL founded Unity Health Score in Dec 2017. Incredible story trying to bring his community in northwest Florida to claim their own health data. He’s also the owner/operator of Stuff and Things Food Services LLC. Hosts the Healthcare Goals podcast.
Website: www.unityhealthscore.com
Udemy Course: https://www.udemy.com/blockchain-and-healthcare/?couponCode=HEALTHUNCHAINED
•Austin’s journey into the healthcare industry started when he became his grandmother’s caregiver
•Elderly people are prime targets for scammers
•Marketing data can be purchased by these scammers from large data brokers
•What problem is Unity Health Score trying to solve?
•Health Insurance Risk modeling methods include raising costs like paying for gym memberships
•Controllable vs. Non-Controllable health outcomes
•Risk modeling should be a more transparent process by letting individuals share their data directly with insurance companies
•Initial offering plans to include a DataScore that will give you a score for the amount of data you upload to the Unity Health Score PHR
•Pensacola, FL interested in an autonomous data-driven city
•Partnership with MyHealth (Emergency health record bank service)
•Outsourcing clinical research
•Austin’s biggest challenge is educating people about existing data brokers methods and making them care data privacy
•Northwestern Florida Community involvement
•Partnerships with BetterPath and Virtumed 360
•UnityHealthScore is aiming to get some revenue and 10,000 users before they try to get seed funding
•Thoughts on the competitive/cooperative healthcare landscape
•What is the hardest part about being an entrepreneur?
Sidenote: Guidance Regarding Methods for De-identification of Protected Health Information in Accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/special-topics/de-identification/index.html
News Corner:
Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates
In a ProPubica article about health insurance, Marshall Allen (award winning health care reporter), discusses the different ways insurance companies take your personal information to adjust your plan premiums. Health scores are generated from hundreds of different data points including race, home ownership, arrest record, social media activity, and TV habits. In fact, there is a way to pull a personal report about you on the LexisNexis website. LexisNexis acts as a data broker for multiple industries, including healthcare. The article also describes the biases and risks of inaccurate information in the datasets. A link to the LexisNexis page and to this article is in the show notes.
Article: https://www.propublica.org/article/health-insurers-are-vacuuming-up-details-about-you-and-it-could-raise-your-rates
Retrieve your personal data: https://personalreports.lexisnexis.com/access_your_full_file_disclosure.jsp
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Healthunchaind
Telegram: https://t.me/healthunchained
